Google, Sony team on open source render manager for visual effects

Google announced a partnership with Sony Pictures Imageworks to release OpenCue, an open source render manager for visual effects and animation.

The service is aimed at video production companies with lots of video content to render. Google Cloud is helping Sony open source its internal queuing system, Cue 3, to let companies use the platform to manage the sequence in which shots are rendered within the post-production pipeline.

As Todd Prives, product manager with Google Cloud, points out in a blog post, on-premise render farms are still in heavy use by visual effects studios, but the cloud offers scalability and security for some additional tools used in the render process.

“We hope that OpenCue can help all studios to better take advantage of the scale and power of GCP and are looking forward to seeing what amazing visual content users will create next,” Prives wrote.

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Google Cloud said that in addition to its involvement in Kubernetes, an open source container orchestration system, and Tensorflow, an open source software library for data flow programming, it has joined the Academy Software Foundation as a founding member to work with studios and software providers to provide standard, open source tools for the visual effects community.

Today's announcement comes after Google Cloud last year released a guide for building a hybrid render farm on its cloud platform.

OpenCue is the latest of several video services the Google Cloud offers as it competes with AWS Elemental and Verizon Digital Media Services.

Google Cloud Platform offers services for rendering workloads, launching new applications and livestreaming video to mass audiences. The platform also offers analytics used for personalizing content and machine learning services for improving searchable databases and audience segmentation.